Five shelters’ tales of the highs and lows of shelter design

Stories of other shelters' building projects introduce a string of tantalizing words and phrases to those longing to update old facilities: introduction rooms, guillotine doors, real-life rooms, power wash systems, cat condos, skylights ... But what works best? What can work for your shelter, and where do you begin?

A new or renovated facility offers plenty of opportunities, enabling a shelter to present a better image to the public, implement new programs and policies, improve animal health with better isolation and separation procedures, reduce animal stress, and raise adoption rates. But a new building can also present new problems, like inadequate staffing or an overwhelming influx of people wanting to surrender or adopt animals.

The shelters profiled here—large and small, urban and rural, private and public—have recently completed renovations, additions, or entirely new facilities. One organization retrofitted existing kennels, another used a pre-engineered building service, and others planned their facilities from scratch. We hope you’ll find some ideas, inspiration, tips, and lessons from their stories.

With any sort of building or renovation project, initial planning must be a priority. Discussing your organization’s or agency’s goals, difficulties, and limitations is a must, as is visiting several shelters to find new ideas and learn from others’ mistakes.

And of course what works for the small humane society may not work for the medium-sized municipal agency. Adjusting the ideas you get from other organizations to suit your budget, staff, and community is the next step. The possibilities are endless, but the research and planning don’t have to feel that way.

In a future issue, we’ll provide a list of the basics of good design, along with selected HSUS recommendations and advice from experts experienced in shelter design and operations.

THE SPCA SERVING ERIE COUNTY
Sixties-era kennels get a dramatic makeover

In the field of shelter design, a successful renovation can sound like ... well, nothing at all. The day after the staff at the SPCA Serving Erie County moved the adoptable dogs to their new kennels in the Northtowns shelter, the foreman of the retrofit project arrived at 6 a.m., as he had every day. This time, however, something was different. “When he got out of his truck, he got an awful sensation that something was terribly wrong, because there was no sound,” says executive director Barbara Carr. “He ran into the building and found that all the dogs were asleep! For the first time in—let’s see, they started in May and this was November—they were all on their beds, snoring.”

LOCATION: Tonawanda, New York ANNUAL BUDGET: About $3 million ANIMALS HANDLED EACH YEAR: 15,000 COMMUNITY SIZE: 960,000 YEAR ORIGINAL SHELTER BUILT: 1962 YEAR SHELTER RENOVATED: 2001 PROJECT COST: About $750,000 TYPE OF SHELTER: Private shelter with housing contracts for three municipalities

The peaceful kennels were a welcome change for the SPCA. Although renovations to other shelter areas had been completed in past years, the kennels had been left alone for decades. “They were the same kennels that they were in 1962,” Carr says. “They were nice kennels in 1962, but left a lot to be desired in 2001.”

The adoptable dog housing needed help on several fronts. It simply didn’t have enough room to accommodate all of the potential adopters, staff, and dogs of various temperaments and health conditions passing through. “The layout of the kennels tended to put people in danger,” says Carr. “They couldn’t pass one another with a dog without big problems.”

And the kennels weren’t exactly a pleasant place to spend time. “People couldn’t really bear to be in them,” Carr says. “It was so loud. So they’d go in quick, pick out the dog they want, take the dog outside, put it back in the kennels, and then come back and hang out in the lobby until it was their turn.”

Unable to contain the shelter traffic, the kennels’ problems spilled out into the rest of the shelter, making the lobby a respite for shelter visitors while turning it into a stressful place for staff, says Carr. “You could never just relax and just do your job because there were so many people in the lobby escaping from the kennels.”

Dogs weren’t immune to the structural problems either. The staff’s ability to clean and disinfect was limited by the existing kennel materials, and the lighting and air exchange needed improvement, Carr says. Dogs’ stress levels were worsened by facing kennels and by their ability to see each other walk by.

The old kennels allowed little space for animal or human traffic.

The time for a change had clearly arrived—and change began with research. Carr talked to architects, visited shelters that had also done building projects, and attended conferences and workshops on the subject.

Eventually, the SPCA chose to address several problems by implementing a Dutch door design. The top halves of the doors are constructed of glass while the lower sections are opaque. Staff can handle the dogs more easily, and can interact with them without having to take the dogs out of the kennels, says Carr.

Because of the two-part design, “dogs can’t see who’s walking by ... so that sort of frustration is gone,” says Carr. “And people can look in the glass and see who’s in the cage, from that top door.” The height of the bottom door also prevents dogs from being irritated by small children’s curious fingers, she says.

Dealing with all those fingerprints and streaks of doggie drool on the glass panels does present some additional cleaning time, but Carr says the benefits seem to outweigh the extra elbow grease. “In two and a half years, I’ve maybe heard a complaint or two from the kennel staff about cleaning it—they hate it, they hate cleaning all that glass,” she says. “But they love how the kennels look. And they love how it looks a lot more than they hate how much extra work it is.”

The construction of the runs—which separately enclose each dog—also greatly reduces noise and encourages visitors to stick around. The results are obvious, Carr says: “You can go back to the kennel at any given time and have a conversation without raising your voice or shouting. ... There’s a little noise, but what a difference—oh my God. First of all, they’re not barking as much because they’re not stimulated. Second of all, when they do bark, it’s quite muffled. And that doesn’t just make the people happier, it makes the dogs happier.”

You don't have to start from scratch to get attractive, functional, and comfortable kennels like these.

One place that dogs wouldn’t generally be happy in a city like Buffalo—where the average high temperature in January sits just below freezing—is outdoors. The original 1962 kennels ill-advisedly included outdoor runs, Carr says. Later that decade, the staff decided to enclose the outdoor runs and add skylights to these newly “inside” runs. Today, the dogs are always free to move between sections of their double runs—and those sections are installed with aggregate marble epoxy flooring, says Carr.

When Carr and her staff had to contend with the nitty-gritty of kennel construction, they found support in their general contractor, who specialized in heat, air, and plumbing. “They were able to really understand the major issues that face us,” she says.

One of those issues is cross-contamination. Individual kennel drains are a big help, Carr says. “When you’re cleaning one kennel, everything that’s in that kennel goes down that one drain, and it doesn’t go into the next kennel.”

The new runs changed how people looked at adoptable dogs—and what they saw. Because animals were now in little rooms behind glass instead of “behind bars,” Carr says, perceptions of both the shelter and the dogs changed for the better—and adoptions increased.

In addition to the adoption kennel makeover, the renovation included air system and floor updates in the other dog housing areas and the addition of two real-life rooms.

Instead of a crowded, noisy, uncomfortable place, the adoption kennels became a space to enjoy. “It really helped the traffic flow, and it kept people in the kennels. ... Now people just meander through the building and the place just feels so much more comfortable. The air is so much cleaner. It’s beautiful. The dogs have natural light, and just in general everything’s better.”

The only new space that the SPCA added during the renovation was an adoption gallery, a 600-square-foot area that serves as a corridor linking the three kennel areas. The gallery’s windows afford plenty of natural light, and the hallway provides seating areas and green plants. As a multi-purpose space complete with a mural and an adjacent outdoor garden, the gallery is also the site of the SPCA’s cocktail parties for donors.

Joining three kennel areas, the new adoption gallery also provides space to host functions for shelter donors.

The journey to happier dogs and happier adopters—which took just 11 months from board approval to opening—wasn’t without its bumps in the road. A task as major as a renovation becomes even more daunting when you don’t happen to be an architectural and engineering expert. “I mean, what do I know about drainage and air exchange? I know it’s important, but how would I know if [the workers] were doing it right?” Carr says. “There’s no way for me to know, other than to say, ‘Is that done?’ and they say, ‘Yes,’ but it’s really nerve-wracking.”

Fortunately, Carr had employed an architectural firm and general contractor whom she trusted. She advises shelters to do their homework and to hire those who come well recommended by prior clients.

Although Carr’s interactions with her general contractor were good, she ran into problems with one of the jobs subcontracted to another company. Because she was already aware that the aluminum storefront material to be used for the kennel doors was prone to scratches, she asked company representatives to show her samples of the two colors they said were immune to this problem. Things didn’t go as planned. “They never did show me samples, and then they showed up with the doors, and they were already scratched,” Carr says.

Because Carr was organized and had been careful to document meeting discussions, those 38 custom doors went right back where they came from, and the shelter got new doors. “If I hadn’t said, ‘Look, at this meeting, at this time, you promised to show me ...’ you know, I could have had to eat that. I think keeping really good notes and always having someone with you that can back you up might very well save you some major heartbreak.”

Retrofitting the existing shelter seems to have been the right strategy for the SPCA, whose innovative kennels have garnered much interest and praise from the public and from other shelters. “I see other people spending five, six, seven, eight million dollars and getting a new shelter,” Carr says, “and I don’t think they’ve got a whole lot more than I’ve got.”

Photos courtesy of SPCA Serving Erie County

THE HUMANE SOCIETY OF REDMOND
A new site and a new facility provide room for isolation and separation of animals—and room to grow

When it's time to move, it’s time to move. When the Humane Society of Redmond learned that their shelter site—land they had once leased from the city for a dollar a year—would soon cost them $20,000 annually, they found a strong impetus to relocate.

LOCATION: Redmond, Oregon ANNUAL BUDGET: Estimated at $325,000 for new facility ANIMALS HANDLED EACH YEAR: 2,500 COMMUNITY SIZE: 60,000 (service area) YEAR ORIGINAL SHELTER BUILT: 1986 YEAR NEW SHELTER BUILT: 2004 PROJECT COST: $1,123,000 TYPE OF SHELTER: Private shelter with housing contract for city and county

The original land, near the Roberts Field Redmond Municipal Airport, had become Federal Aviation Administration property. In 1996, executive director Jamie Scanlon-Kanski learned that the FAA planned to begin charging fair market value for leases that were due to expire—and the Humane Society’s time would be up in 2004.

Meanwhile, Redmond’s rapidly growing population could not be ignored. “Redmond has become one of the fastest growing cities in Oregon—it’s something that we never foresaw back in the ’80s,” says Scanlon-Kanski, “because at that time we only had a population of about 3,000 and some.” Now at 60,000, the area’s population is expected to double in the next 10 years, she says.

After the Humane Society secured a five-acre parcel of land nearby, which was deeded to the organization by the city of Redmond, its leaders began a capital campaign. The new site offered opportunities to concentrate more on animal flow, something the shelter urgently needed to improve, Scanlon-Kanski says. Though the organization contracts with the city and county to house strays, quarantined animals, and animals involved in bite cases, the old facility didn’t allow for isolation and separation of these animals.

The new shelter, due to open in late April, will give the organization a clean slate and the chance to update other aspects of shelter operations as well. Concerned about the cross-contamination risks of trench drains, Scanlon-Kanski decided to steer clear. “We’ll have a centralized drain system under the floors, and leading into that central pipe system will be a separate drain for each kennel. And those are six-inch pipes so that even if somebody accidentally left the drain cover off and a tennis ball went down the drain, it wouldn’t clog the system.”

In the center staff aisles between the kennels in both stray-holding and adoption areas will be a flush drain, which will help control odors, Scanlon-Kanski says. “Right now we have waste buckets—if [staff] scoop during the day, the waste is put into those buckets and then wrapped up in garbage bags and thrown away. [Soon] we won’t have anything like that sitting around—they can just scoop and flush.”

Cleaning and disinfecting will also be facilitated by a new power wash system. Pre-measured, pre-mixed chemicals can eliminate human error and improve safety for staff and animals. The chemicals are distributed with an overhead reel system—sort of like a car wash, says Scanlon-Kanski.

Mindful of security issues, the Humane Society chose to install two-sided kennels rather than indoor/outdoor runs. Outside exercise areas will serve as a source of canine fun in the sun. Would-be furry sunbathers will still be content, though, as all of the kennel and cage areas have stationary (non-functional) windows.

The kennel layout means that in the new runs, not only will dogs be able to see the sun, but they won’t have to constantly see each other. In addition, the two segments of the runs will be separated by guillotine gates to assist in cleaning efficiency, and the rear section will be accessible from the center staff work area. “We’ll have a half-covered gate so again there’s not dogs looking at other dogs,” Scanlon-Kanski explains. “We’ll have a bottom plate across each one of those.”

Lest the feline population get jealous, Redmond cats will be enjoying their own new amenities. Three colony rooms will be located near the main door of the new shelter—complete with vaulted ceilings and skylights. Cat housing will include additional cat caging as well as a locked kitten nursery.

Like young cats, puppies will also be separated from the adult population in five elevated puppy pens that measure four feet by four feet and offer storage compartments for materials like shredded paper. Disease control is in the forefront of Scanlon-Kanski’s mind.

“Those will have a locked [Plexiglas] front so that even little kids can come in with families and view the puppies, but in order to interact with them they would have to get staff or volunteer assistance to go into an interaction room so that we don’t have people cross-contaminating by handling from one puppy pen to another,” she says.

People flow and traffic was a significant consideration in planning; certain aspects of shelter operations have been too public in the past, Scanlon-Kanski says. Because the euthanasia room is near the back door of the current shelter and the crematorium is just outside it, both are easily visible from the nearby road. “At the new facility, everything’s again located at the back but it’s all enclosed, so that that’s out of the public eye and they don’t see any of that stuff that has to go on,” Scanlon-Kanski says.

At Redmond’s new facility, the crematorium and euthanasia room are no longer easily visible from outside the shelter.

Different shelter functions will also be better separated in the new facility, where return-to-owner and adopted animals will exit through the front areas and stray and quarantine animals will enter through the back. A newly trained corps of volunteers will staff the reception area to answer phone calls, greet visitors, and provide information, Scanlon-Kanski says.

The hallways that those enthusiastic volunteers and curious visitors will be walking on will be made of specially treated concrete. “We’re going to do an acid treatment of the concrete and use a clear sealer on it. What that does is [provide] a low-cost way to add some color and variance to the concrete floor, but with the clear sealer you can just keep that maintained as you need to,” Scanlon-Kanski says.

The kennels will also include concrete flooring, but this concrete will be tinted and covered with a clear sealer, which usually requires regular re-sealing. This method of adding color to concrete is more costly than an acid treatment, which produces more of a mottled blend of colors, says Scanlon-Kanski.

Color will be found in abundance in the new lobby area, which will be accompanied by a resource library, gift shop, memorial/ thank-you wall of personalized bricks, and quiet room. Visitors who wish to read up on animal care or buy a gift for a friend will find what they need in the library and store, while the quiet room will provide a place for grieving pet owners to find some peace.

“I’ve seen folks come into this shelter and they have to come in and have their older pet euthanized for whatever reason, and they’re naturally very upset. I think it’s not very empathetic to have them be out in that public busy lobby when they’re that upset, so we’ll have a nice little area that they can go into and we can help them through the process,” Scanlon-Kanski says.

Perhaps one of the most important areas of the new shelter is the one that has nothing in it. Because of the growing Redmond population, the plans for the new facility include a 1,438-square-foot room adjacent to the adoption kennels. The interior remains versatile—ready to be finished at a later time when the space is needed.

Looking at the new puppy pens or the ceramic wall tiles painted by local children that will be placed throughout the shelter, visitors probably wouldn’t suspect the unexpected expenses, struggles, and delays the organization experienced during its dealings with city government. Because she says she didn’t get consistent information from the city during the process, Scanlon-Kanski recommends keeping detailed documentation. “Tape-record meetings with [your] community development or public works department, because that information will change oftentimes,” she says.

The Humane Society chose to investigate “design-builds,” or arrangements in which one company assumes construction, engineering, and architectural functions under a single contract. The organization ended up working through the chosen builder to secure an architect who had some veterinary clinic experience. But if she had it to do over again, Scanlon-Kanski might take a different route: Instead of choosing the design-build option, which seemed to underestimate eventual costs, Scanlon-Kanski recommends that shelters define their needs and meet with an architect first.

No matter which methods you choose to get you to that point, the move to a new facility can present problems. Scanlon-Kanski anticipates that change in any form will create hurdles. “Change is hard for a lot of people, so [it’s a matter of] accepting that now you’re in a much bigger place, you’ve got a lot more to take care of,” she says. “How do we work out a daily routine that’s going to cover all of those things and have people be open to those changes?”

To soften the blow for people who’ve grown used to doing things a certain way, she suggests including staff in the planning process and keeping them apprised of the changes they can expect in the new shelter. “The challenges will be [in] the transition,” Scanlon-Kanski says.

Photo courtesy of Humane Society of Redmond

BLOOMINGTON ANIMAL CARE AND CONTROL
An expanded facility gives adoptions a new home—with new policies

A typical shelter director's office likely would include a computer, paperwork, maybe some framed pet photos ... but a young couple getting to know a two-year-old Lab mix?

LOCATION: Bloomington, Indiana ANNUAL BUDGET: $700,000 ANIMALS HANDLED EACH YEAR: 5,200 COMMUNITY SIZE: 120,000 YEAR ORIGINAL SHELTER BUILT: mid-1960s YEAR SHELTER RENOVATED: 2004 PROJECT COST: $500,000 TYPE OF SHELTER: Public agency that provides animal control and housing for the city

Without a get-acquainted room or other appropriate space, people at Bloomington Animal Care and Control have to improvise when they want to meet an adoptable animal.

“People use my office [or] meet in the hallway. We do have some outside areas, but when it’s cold and snowy or muddy, those are kind of off-limits,” says Laurie Ringquist, director of animal care and control.

The building lacks the space necessary not only for humans to come together with animals, but for animals to remain apart. In recent years shelter staff have been making do with a facility that didn’t allow for isolation and separation of healthy, sick, incoming, and quarantined animals. The building was becoming such a cause for concern in the community that an independent organization called the Monroe County Humane Association began “Campaign Humane,” an initiative designed to raise funds for a new facility.

The rest of the community got involved as well. Bloomington Animal Care and Control found cooperation from city officials (including the former and current mayors), volunteers, local media, and a local architect/engineering team that drew up designs on donated time.

Those designs will soon result in a new 4,000-square-foot adoption center that will almost double the space of the old 5,000-square-foot facility. Expected to be operational in April, this new wing will house adoptable animals who have undergone behavior evaluations and spay/neuter surgeries. Staff plan to house strays, sick animals, and bite cases in the existing facility.

The new addition will allow staff to be much more proactive about disease control, especially for cats. Under the current arrangements, the agency has been housing stray and adoptable cats in a single room, while sick cats are put into a “special care” room along with dogs. “We have, I think, a pretty severe cat health issue. Our cats are always sick—always URIs, sneezing, running eyes. We’ve tried all kinds of things to get over that, and I think it’s just the space,” Ringquist says.

Ringquist hopes the new improvements—including a stray cat room, a sick cat room, and an adoptable area—will make a big difference. Cats can be isolated and observed before entering the adoptable area, and cats who are ill will no longer share space with barking dogs. In addition, sick cats will no longer be placed opposite each other, so a sneeze won’t be as effective a disease transmitter.

All aspects of the new colony room have been carefully planned. Some are still in progress, such as the search for kitty “entertainment centers” that include things to climb on, crawl through, or hide in. But the agency has settled on a flooring material called Medintech, which doesn’t stop at the floor-wall junction but continues on to wrap up the wall. “That will prevent all the gunk from getting stuck in crevices and nooks and crannies,” Ringquist says. “That’s going to be in all the cat areas where we need to be hosing in there.”

The agency has also decided on cat caging from Shor-Line, choosing some cages with stainless steel fronts and others with Plexiglas fronts “for those who might be sneezing or might need a little more separation.” Plexiglas cage fronts also reduce cross-contamination through the hands of the curious public—and tend to make housing areas look more like little cozy nooks than cages. The built-in perches help to make cats feel comfortable.

Face-to-face kennels like these can encourage dogs to bark at one another across the center aisle, increasing noise as well as dogs’ stress levels.

Adoptable dogs will enjoy separation of a slightly different kind. In the new kennels, dividing walls between runs will be six feet high, and all of the kennels will have tops. That’s a major improvement over the existing runs in the older part of the building. Divided by a concrete half-wall topped with chain link, the runs act as an open invitation to some dogs to “fence fight”; dogs whom Ringquist describes as “very athletic” have even managed to clamber over the dividers into neighboring kennels.

In addition to keeping dogs safer, the new kennels are designed to keep them calmer and quieter. Instead of having face-offs with each other across the center aisle, dogs in the new kennels will now stand opposite a quieter hallway.

Although the issue of indoor/outdoor runs may have some shelter directors poring over “pros and cons” lists, Ringquist and her staff went with the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” school of thought. “That’s what we have now [in the original building]; it’s how we operate in terms of cleaning and letting dogs in and out. I think for dogs that are housebroken it helps them have kind of a separation of their sleeping area and their outside area.”

While the indoor/outdoor issue was a no-brainer for Ringquist, some aspects of planning proved to be trickier. About six weeks before the project was due to be completed, last-minute change orders were creating a significant strain on the budget. “As we’ve been building the project, little things come up, like ‘Oh, we didn’t put sinks in the cat room.’ Well, duh, you know? ‘Boy, we designed this workroom, but it sure would be nice now to have a washer and dryer in the workroom instead of down the hall.’ ”

Faced with added expenses at this stage, Ringquist and her staff have had to prioritize. High on the list was the need for improved plumbing and drainage that would make cleaning easier. By putting a trough drain at the location of the guillotine door and one in the outside half of the run, staff are able to hose down the run in one direction only, Ringquist says.

Having easily disinfected rooms was key. “We have a lot of floor drains throughout the building, so every place is washable, hoseable, cleanable. Other than in the office type areas, there are floor drains in every room where there could possibly be animals.”

High concrete divider walls in the new runs at Bloomington will prevent nose-to-nose contact.

For those areas geared mainly toward people, community art will be on view. The city’s construction requirements include a one-percent allotment for art, and the Bloomington Arts Commission works with agencies to help them find appropriate artwork. In addition, a Girl Scout troop will lend its talents to create murals in both the cat and dog introduction rooms, areas that will serve as a welcome alternative to Ringquist’s office.

Not only will Bloomington staff be able to do more of what they’ve already attempted to do in the existing facility, but they’ll also be able to expand programs and implement new policies. Ringquist hopes that by the time the adoption center opens, staff will be trained in the Matchmaker program developed by Emily Weiss in conjunction with the Kansas Humane Society.

The new facility and the lifestyle-matching program will combine to help Ringquist and her staff streamline adoptions through better characterization of animal personalities, improved adoption counseling, and spaying or neutering of all animals before they leave the shelter. Bloomington does not have a vet on staff; instead, surgeries are performed off site and through visits from a local vet’s mobile spay/neuter clinic.

Ringquist hopes that an increased adoption fee will fund microchipping of adoptable animals and testing for heartworm, feline leukemia, and feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV). She’s currently negotiating with local veterinarians.

But Ringquist’s big plans have to be tempered by her situation; the expansion of space and services won’t be mirrored by a corresponding expansion of staff. “I’ve got one additional kennel worker to staff the entire new space, so that’s going to be a challenge—to staff basically two buildings with basically one additional worker,” she says.

While the two wings of the facility will essentially become one building connected by the old front door, the agency will retain the front desk in the existing building for strays and surrenders. Meanwhile, the new adoption center’s front desk will be designated for adopters—but there will not be additional reception or customer service staff hired to help. “We’re going to have to rely more heavily on volunteers to help us with some of the cleaning and the customer service things,” says Ringquist.

Some decisions remain to be made. “We oftentimes have more than 14 adoptable adult dogs, and I’ve only got 14 adoptable adult kennels. So we’re starting to talk about how we will rotate animals. Will it be ‘first come, first serve’ [and] they wait for the first slot to open? Will we let the public go back and forth between the two buildings? So we still kind of have some operational questions to sort out.”

To help guard against that overlooked washer and dryer or the missing cat room sink, Ringquist recommends careful planning. “Think about the day-to-day operations very carefully as you’re designing it: Where does your staff need to go and what do they need to do? And what kinds of equipment would make their jobs easier?”

In the midst of the current and future challenges, Ringquist has high hopes for the adoption center. “A lot of people don’t feel like they can come in here; they get too upset by being in here,” she says. “I’m hoping that the new facility will be bright and attractive and happy and more people will want to come in, and we will be able to do a better job of matching them for an adoption.”

Photos by Debra Kent

THE HUMANE SOCIETY OF YOUNG COUNTY
A small rural shelter goes the “prefabricated” route

The former facility used by the Humane Society of Young County had two big problems that were self-perpetuating—crowding and disease transmission. Built when the organization’s intake was 500 to 600 animals a year, the shelter was just too small to function at its best by the time intake reached about 1,600. “Because of being contracted with the city, there were animals [who]—even though we didn’t want to keep them because we knew they weren’t adoptable, or they were sick, they were injured—we had to keep them those three days,” says shelter manager Jessica McDowell.

LOCATION: Graham, Texas ANNUAL BUDGET: $69,000 ANIMALS HANDLED EACH YEAR: 1,600 COMMUNITY SIZE: County population is 19,000, but adjacent counties lack animal services YEAR ORIGINAL SHELTER BUILT: 1980 YEAR SHELTER RENOVATED: 2002 PROJECT COST: $250,000 TYPE OF SHELTER: Private shelter with stray housing contract for city

Insufficient physical separation of animals in adjoining runs compounded the problem, and disease spread quickly. Nose-to-nose contact among dogs in the old facility was routine; runs were constructed of one-inch by two-inch welded wire and encouraged fence-fighting and quick disease transmission. “We were getting a bad reputation in the old shelter,” McDowell says. “If one dog got adopted out and it had signs of parvo or did test positive for parvo, you pretty much felt like everything in the shelter had it.”

The layout itself wasn’t helping to control disease—or animal stress, she says: “At our old shelter, [the dogs] could bark at each other across the aisle, and sometimes you could see the slobber flying out! And it also caused a lot of racket too. They would agitate each other.”

Plans for a new shelter began with budget considerations that took into account what kind of facility the organization could afford to operate. Previous fundraising helped determine the level of support the shelter could anticipate, says McDowell, and raising enough capital became easier when a three-acre piece of land was donated for the new site. (The old shelter was sitting on rented city property.)

In mapping out plans for the new facility, McDowell and the board decided to work with Houndquarters, a company that offers both blueprint services and pre-engineered building materials. “We put out our ideas on what we wanted the shelter to look like and how it was set up, and they did the blueprints for it,” McDowell says, “so when we were going to the really big donors, it just made us look that much better.”

Although the nature of pre-engineered buildings can limit the extent to which a shelter can customize a structure while still cutting down on costs, it can help speed up construction time. Under the arrangement with the Humane Society of Young County, Houndquarters shipped the building materials, and the organization was responsible for finding someone else to lay the concrete slab and install the plumbing. During the next step, an engineer from Houndquarters arrived, and the Humane Society hired its own general contractor to do the work. “I think the bare bones of it was up in probably three weeks,” McDowell says.

The wire of the old runs was succeeded by kennels that have dividing panels with an exterior of Fiberglass Reinforced Plastic (FRP) that are topped with two feet of vertical bars. These divider walls afford support to the organization’s other disease control efforts.

The new shelter layout enables McDowell and her staff to isolate sick animals. “We don’t do rabies quarantine here because we just don’t want to get into that liability,” she says, “but at least if we see someone that’s sick or injured we do have four kennels at the very back that are closed off from the others. We can shut and lock the door, and it’s right by our medical rooms.”

Staff can also separate the cat population much more easily, with a “ready to adopt” room, a “new arrival” room, cat condos, kitten areas, and cages near the temporary holding area.

Shelter functions are also better separated now, McDowell says. “At our old shelter, everything that came in and went out all went through the small little office,” she says. “So when we planned this one, we went for an area just for the animal control [officer] to bring her animals in. And at the opposite end of the building where the lobby is, we have a public surrender area that’s enclosed so the animals just don’t come into the lobby and run amok!”

The new shelter allows for other designated areas, including separate rooms for grooming, laundry, and medical functions. The get-acquainted room is new, too: “That was something everybody wanted,” says McDowell.

The door to the temporary holding area at the Humane Society of Young County can be locked and closed to maintain separation of animal areas.

McDowell says the plumbing systems are much improved, with gutter-style drains that have grates on top and send wastewater through the septic system after staff scoop and sweep up everything they can. But finding plumbers to do the specialty job was difficult in the rural area; locating a plumber to even bid on the project was a struggle. By networking with people involved in other local building projects, such as restaurant construction, the organization eventually secured a plumber, but the process was still challenging.

Looking back, McDowell still wonders if it would have been worth it to hire a more experienced plumber from somewhere like the Dallas-Forth Worth area about two hours away—but she acknowledges that such a move would have strained the project’s budget. A sort of North Texas building boom involving big-budget projects seemed to coincide with the shelter’s construction job, so available and willing plumbers were in short supply. “So we’re begging and borrowing and they were building mansions out on a ... lake in the area for the rich and famous of the metroplex,” McDowell says.

To save money, the shelter used volunteer labor, which generally turned out well. But finding a good contractor to help direct the crew—one who was familiar with the needs of animal shelters— proved no less daunting. McDowell wishes now that she had done more research and hired one with more background in that area, since the contractor she ended up working with encountered things he’d had no prior experience with.

But the project may have appeared easier than it truly was, McDowell says. “I think he depended too much on the simplicity ... because it really did go up real fast, and economically, and I think he thought the [volunteers] could understand reading blueprints as well as he could, and they didn’t!” she says with a laugh.

Having researched HSUS recommendations for air exchange and consulted other resources, the organization’s leaders knew what they wanted in terms of air and ventilation systems. The hard part, once again, was finding someone to implement their ideas. “Nobody had really done this type of ventilation before, and we ended up going with a company that had done some work at the new hospital here, so that was a help,” McDowell says. “[The company] had a little better understanding.”

The efficiency of heating and cooling in the shelter is significantly helped by the building materials, McDowell says. Through hot summers and cold spells in the winter, the shelter remains insulated from extremes. Even with double the square footage of the old facility (4,100 square feet compared to about 1,800), utility bills have remained steady.

“The kennel area has never been above 78 degrees in the heat of the summer, and we hit in the 100s [outside], easy,” McDowell says.

Houndquarters wall panels are specially designed for their insulating qualities. Laminated with Fiberglass Reinforced Plastic, the core is composed of an expanded polystyrene core (EPS). Materials are rated for insulating power with a range of R-Values, and higher R-Values indicate better insulation. Houndquarters’ roof panels are R30, while wall panels are R16.7. Other building materials are insulated as well, including doors and windows.

While keeping some effects of the weather out, the shelter lets the light in. Skylights in the kennel area add natural light—so much so that sometimes electric lighting isn’t even necessary.

A welcome change from the old facility that McDowell now calls “a dungeon,” the new shelter is bright and smells clean—a credit to both the effective cleaning procedures implemented by staff and the white, disinfectable building materials provided by Houndquarters. The bars on the top of the panels that partition the kennels are easier to disinfect than the wire was, and the white color of the panels makes it easy for staff to tell when the material is clean.

“It makes the dogs look better, and we’re always complimented on how clean it is, and how clean-smelling it is,” says McDowell. “We’ll have people walk in the door, and they’ll holler back, ‘It doesn’t smell!’ and I don’t think you can get a better compliment than that.”

With the help of a new listing on Petfinder.com, word of the new shelter has spread to the community—a mixed blessing for the staff of the Humane Society. “I’d say the first few months we had a lot of people bringing in animals that wouldn’t have brought them to the old shelter,” says McDowell. “But adoptions have gone up, and I think a lot of the people that come in from out of town that have found pets on Petfinder have been very complimentary on how nice it is, and they’ve even compared it to better than their big-city shelters.”

Donations have risen, too, says McDowell. “People are like, ‘Well, I’ll donate to a place that looks like this,’ instead of the dungeon-looking place we had before,” she says. “Even though we know it’s a shelter, it doesn’t have that shelter drudge look, and I think a lot of that has to do with these white walls that we can hose down and bleach down and squeegee off.”

Photo courtesy of Humane Society of Young County

CHEYENNE ANIMAL SHELTER
Other shelters inspire ideas for a new facility

Executive director Bill Hein didn't know that building a new shelter would lead to the best compliment he’s ever received. On his second day in the facility, which opened last December, Hein overheard a woman talking about the shelter. “She was on her cell phone saying, ‘Ma, you got to come out here—you wouldn’t believe what I’m looking at. You wouldn’t believe Cheyenne could build something like this. This is fantastic, it’s beautiful, it’s wonderful.’”

LOCATION: Cheyenne, Wyoming ANNUAL BUDGET: $500,000 (expected to increase soon) ANIMALS HANDLED EACH YEAR: 6,200 COMMUNITY SIZE: 86,000 YEAR ORIGINAL SHELTER BUILT: in phases from 1978 to 1980 YEAR SHELTER RENOVATED: 2003 PROJECT COST: $2.9 million TYPE OF SHELTER: Private shelter with contract to run city and county animal control and housing

The kudos helped to reassure Hein of the project’s success. “Listening to that young lady’s comments made my heart jump, literally,” he says, “and I said, ‘We’ve done something right.’ ”

That overheard phone call came at the culmination of a long journey to a new facility for the Cheyenne Animal Shelter and Marian & Curtis Rochelle & April Brimmer-Kunz Adoption Center. At Hein’s first board meeting 12 years ago, he briefed the board of directors on the problems with the existing shelter. The facility was small, understaffed, and overcrowded, and it had an uninviting, institutional appearance, he says. “When you get six customers in there, it’s a crowd,” he told them.

After adding board members with community connections or construction experience, hiring a director of development, procuring a bond issuance from local government to help fund construction, accepting a donation of a 10-acre lot for the new facility, visiting several shelters, and consulting with The HSUS and American Humane, Hein and Cheyenne were well on their way to a new 21,000-square-foot facility.

Like many shelters building anew, the Cheyenne Animal Shelter had not separated animal populations in its old facility. Strays and adoptables were mixed in together, and the public could view them all. Conflict would arise when a visitor wanted to adopt a stray and didn’t accept the explanation that the shelter had to hold him for three days. The arrangement stressed the animals, too, because so many people were coming and going into the same area all the time.

In the new facility, the delineations are clear: Strays are housed separately, and when a member of the public comes to the shelter seeking a lost dog, he cannot enter the stray area alone. A staff member will check the stray records and show the visitor digital photos. “If they think there’s a possible match then they go through a secured door,” Hein says. “In the old shelter, we actually had some irate customers just reach into a kennel, take their dog out, and threaten us on their way out of the building.”

The new indoor/outdoor runs permit staff to move dogs outside while cleaning the kennels.

Small animals and birds got their own rooms, too, in the new facility, complete with many features their former makeshift caging didn’t offer. Hein became interested in the specially designed housing he saw at the Dumb Friends League and the Boulder Valley Humane Society, both in Colorado. Designed by Companion Habitats in Colorado Springs, the small-animal habitats move on casters, making them more mobile. They also have their own HVAC, their own lighting system, and locked doors “so people can’t just reach in and get nipped or take anything they want out,” says Hein.

“We had people stealing ferrets at our old facility,” he says. “They would just reach into the cage when nobody was there and stuff it in their pocket and walk out the door.”

The small-animal environments are not only functional but also attractive to adopters: “The better you display those animals, the faster they go home,” Hein says, recalling that the shelters he’d visited had advised him of that. “We used to have rabbits that would stay with us—my God, it seemed forever.”

Aside from the new small-animal housing, the project addressed animal comfort in other ways. Those animals in the stray and treatment areas are more insulated from the public, and the additional space in the adoptable areas ensures that animals don’t see crowds of people swarming by. The animals also hear music during the day, through a Muzak system that’s limited to classical, light jazz, and light rock, Hein says.

Like the new stray/adoptable separation, the new cat housing has improved both animal health and customer relations. In the old shelter, the stainless steel cages caused problems for people and cats alike: “Upper respiratory ran rampant, you know—fingers, fingers everywhere,” says Hein, who used to field calls from people who’d gotten upset after being told not to try to touch the animals.

The lobby, as an area geared more toward people than animals, gives Cheyenne a chance to use wooden beams to echo the rustic look of the facility’s exterior.

That’s no longer an issue in the new facility, where the adoptable cat condos surround a center staff area, and customers can view the kitties through Plexiglas on the public side. Improved air exchange, better disinfection, reduced URI, increased living space, and items to rest on and play with have made for happier, more relaxed cats, Hein says. “I get my kicks by laughing because they’re all splayed out—all over the place, like ‘I don’t want to be adopted, I could stay here, I got my three squares a day and I’ve got friends to play with.’ ”

When adopters want to take these kitties home into even more comfortable surroundings, the shelter’s lobby provides a good place to start. Much larger than the previous facility’s lobby, the area provides a peaceful, quiet space for adoption counseling. “In the old place you couldn’t hear your conversation with an adopter for all the other conversations. Here you can,” Hein says.

The lobby is able to easily accommodate the additional adopters who are visiting the new shelter. “I can’t tell you how much more traffic we have through here because of the appearance of the building. And that’s the main thing. You can’t get the animals homes unless you get the public in here,” Hein says.

A combination of new policies and a pleasant new appearance and atmosphere have smoothed customer service interactions at the shelter. “Because of the look of the building, I think in part, we’ve had less contention with customers at our front desk,” says Hein.

Operational improvements that accompanied the move to the new building—including spay/neuter before adoption and staff uniforms—have reduced the arguments at the counter and engendered more respectful behavior. Now, the atmosphere is “more like—if I could be so presumptuous to say—a church!” says Hein.

Spay/neuter before adoption is just one of the new policies that Cheyenne decided to implement at the new shelter. The in-house veterinary clinic is staffed by volunteer vets, and efforts are being made to encourage even more to contribute their time.

Before the big move, Hein and the board investigated how to improve and streamline adoptions, eventually deciding to implement behavior evaluations and the Matchmaker program, which helps match people with pets who are right for their lifestyles.

Cats can be cared for—and cages can be cleaned—from the center staff area on the opposite side of this public hallway.

Other preparations included acclimating staff to the new facility before it even opened. “Visit your construction site frequently,” recommends Hein. “And that means everybody; it’s not just the executive director walking around going, ‘Hmm, I didn’t know so much about plumbing before,’ or ‘Gee, there’s a whole new world to me of flooring surfaces.’ Take everybody out, so they see where they’ll work and what they’re going to be doing—and how their areas have changed.”

In Cheyenne’s case, staff experienced an adjustment period after moving into the new shelter, which is about four times the size of the previous facility. “[The staff] came from a very small facility where everybody was stepping on each other,” Hein says. “You swivel around in your chair and there’s a person right behind that you need to ask your question of. Here, we had to equip them with two-way radios to just keep in touch and find out where people are.”

And there aren’t as many people to get in touch with as Hein would like; the city and county governments weren’t amenable to a staffing increase last year, he says. “They wanted us to kind of ride with our old budget and see how we did on it, and I agreed to that. I said, ‘You know, it’s going to burn us out, but we’ll try.’ ”

In addition to an expansion in staff, Hein hopes that someday the organization’s property will expand, too. The donors of the current plot of land own about 400 acres nearby, and with future plans that include off-site adoption, a community-based dog walking program, the teaching of basic commands to dogs before adoption, and possible wildlife rehabilitation, Cheyenne may need room to grow.

Photos by Sue Castaneda